The Devil's Puzzle (14 page)

“No word at all on an engagement?”

I thought about the plans Oliver and I had made for her garden and their lives. “I think that’s on hold for the moment,” I said.

“Maybe on your birthday. That’s coming up July 3rd.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, Grandma.”

“I suppose he has a lot going on,” she said. “Still, he can’t wait his whole life for the right moment to propose. Someone once said to me that a woman can live her whole life without a man and be complete, but a man needs a woman. We women have our friends to share our feelings with, you see. But for many men, they only really open up in the company of the woman they love.”

I put a mug in front of her and poured her tea. “Was the someone who told you that Grace?”

“Not all my pearls of wisdom come from Grace, though that one happened to.”

“And the house did, too,” I said. “Did you inherit it?”

“No. I bought it.”

“From her children?”

“Yes.”

“And neither one of them wanted to keep it?”

“Why? Her son was in South America and her daughter was in California. I think they were pleased it was going to someone who was as close as family,” she said. “By then, I guess they thought of me that way. I certainly thought of Grace that way.”

“And you were close to them? Her children, I mean?”

She sighed. “I was close to the daughter. Winston, Grace’s son, was a difficult man to be close to.”

“Have you kept in touch with them?”

“Letters at Christmas.” She pointed to a drawer in the kitchen where she kept cards and letters too precious to throw out.

“Both of them?”

“What’s the sudden interest?”

“Curious, I guess.”

I knew I was getting very close to breaking my promise to Jesse, but I comforted myself with the fact that I’d actually only promised not to talk about Winston being the skeleton—I hadn’t said I wouldn’t talk about Winston at all.

“Did they pay you well?” I asked. “Grace and her children?”

“Why?”

“You bought the house. It must have been pricey.”

“Your grandfather sold life insurance, Nell. He would have been a poor salesman if he didn’t own some of it himself.” She was tired and growing impatient with me. “What’s the sudden interest in this house? Are you and Jesse hoping to move in here once you’re married?”

“How did we get back to that?” I laughed. “He has his own house, Grandma.”

“It’s a tiny little place. Not enough for three, or eventually maybe four or five of you.” She sat back in her chair and looked around the kitchen. “It wouldn’t be such a bad idea, really. I could clear out the sewing room. That’s really the master bedroom anyway. You and Jesse could take that, and Allie could take your room, and that still leaves another bedroom for a nursery down the line. And then when I go, you could take over the house.”

“You’re not going anytime soon,” I said. “Unless you moved in with Oliver.”

“I’m a little old for living in sin, Nell.”

“You could marry him. Make an honest man out him.”

She swallowed the last of her tea and got up from the chair. “And you accuse me of bringing up the same conversation again and again.” She turned to the dog. “Come on, Barney, we’ll go to sleep and let Nell clean up the kitchen.”

Once I was alone, I grabbed the cards and letters from the kitchen drawer and began sorting through them. Most were from the past year. A few birthday cards, postcards from my parents who were still traveling the globe, a letter from Eleanor’s sister who lived in Philadelphia, and more than a dozen thank-you cards.

Eleanor’s generosity and kindness, I was glad to see, had not been forgotten by the people of Archers Rest. She was thanked for the donations of money, time, and quilts to everything from an AIDS fundraiser to a children’s choir. Whatever may have happened years ago, however she got this house, it was obvious Eleanor had led a good life. Not that I was, even for a moment, suggesting, even to myself, that Eleanor had done anything wrong. I knew her too well to think something like that.

At the bottom of the pile there were a few Christmas cards. Most were from friends in town, but one was from California. The return address said it was from Elizabeth Sullivan. The card was simple, just an illustration of a Christmas tree, and inside there was only a short message:

There was no mention of Grace. No last name of Roemer. But it had to be Grace’s daughter. She’d moved to California. Eleanor had said they kept in touch through Christmas cards and this was the only one from someone I didn’t know. Maybe that was little to go on, but it was all I had. If it was Winston buried in the yard, then Elizabeth would be our best chance at a DNA match, and maybe an answer to why he had ended up there.

CHAPTER 22

“I
need to do a search on a woman named Elizabeth Sullivan,” I told Natalie the next morning as we opened the shop. “I have her address, so it shouldn’t be hard to find her phone number.”

“First I have to tell you about Winston,” she said. “I did a little digging after I got your text. Is he the skeleton?”

“We’re not sure yet. What did you find out?”

“He was the oldest child of Grace and William Roemer,” she said.

“Born in New York. He went to Harvard for undergrad. Graduated in 1953. He studied ancient tribes there, and eventually got a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University in 1958. He wrote three books, all out of print, having to do with ancient tribes in South America.”

“Eleanor said something about his being in South America,” I told her. “That’s why he didn’t want the house.”

“But maybe he did,” she said, smiling. “He had accepted a job teaching at Avalon University, to begin in the fall of 1975. They were just starting an anthropology department and he was going to chair it.”

“That’s less than an hour from here,” I said. “Maybe we should go there and see if he’s still teaching there.”

She shook her head. “Already called. I talked to the current chair of anthropology and he referred me to a retired professor who had started with the department in ’75. So I called him, and he said that Winston never started the job. According to this professor, Winston came in, made a big impression on everyone, donated some huge sum of money to the school, and practically insisted on chairing the department. Then, after the school set up the department, Winston decided to go back to South America instead.”

“That’s a lot of information for one day. You’re getting good at this.”

Her son, Jeremy, pulled at her jeans and Natalie struggled to lean down to pick him up, so I did it for her.

“I’m too pregnant for bending,” she said, “but at least I can use the computer. And it’s amazing how much I could find out just looking at the newspaper archives from the Hudson Valley. I had no idea how prominent Grace’s family was in the area at the time. Everything they did was in an article somewhere.”

Natalie touched her computer screen and brought up several newspaper articles with fuzzy black-and-white photos. The first one had a caption that identified Grace and her adult children, along with several other people, standing in front of the library.

“That’s Winston?” I asked, pointing to the tall, stern-looking man with glasses who stood to Grace’s right. “He’d be good-looking if he smiled.”

“Doesn’t seem the type to smile,” Natalie said. She pointed to the woman at the edge of the picture. “Guess who that is?”

I looked closely. “Maggie. I guess that makes sense. She was the town librarian.” I looked closer. “Wow, she looks so pretty. Not that she isn’t pretty now.”

“I agree on both counts. And notice, she’s looking right at Winston.”

She was. But I couldn’t tell from the grainy image if she was smiling or scowling.

Natalie pressed another key on her computer. “There’s even a photograph of Grace with Glad’s father and one in front of the movie theater.”

“Any news on Winston after South America?” I asked, as Jeremy tugged at my hair.

“Not a thing. He must never have come back to the area.”

“Or he never left.”

Natalie sighed. “Do you really think it’s him?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? It was his house, after all.”

“How did someone with his background end up buried in the backyard?”

“Someone put him there.”

“It’s weird,” Natalie said, “considering we never met her, but it just breaks my heart for Grace that her son could have been murdered.”

“I feel the same way.”

We were both silent for a moment before Natalie finally spoke. But she’d moved on to another mystery we were trying to unravel.

“By the way, I made a couple of calls about Ed Bryant. No one had anything bad to say about him, at least as a teacher. He was friendly but not too friendly. He was fair in his grades. He wasn’t big on school activities, but he did what was required of him,” she told me. “The only interesting piece of gossip was that he had an affair, or that’s what people thought, with someone named Glee.”

“Glad’s sister?”

“You’re kidding! The only sister I’ve ever heard of is Mrs. Shipman, that recluse of a woman who lives in the ugly brown house.”

“That’s the one. Apparently her nickname was Glee.”

“We have to find out more,” she said excitedly.

“Why, Natalie? What does that have to do with Eleanor not wanting to get married or a skeleton in the backyard?”

“I don’t know. It’s just interesting.” Natalie curled her lips into a frown. “What’s happening to you, anyway? You used to be the town—”

“Busybody, snoop, nosy neighbor . . .” I finished her sentence for her.

“I was going to say ‘the town’s most curious citizen.’”

“Any way you say it, it’s not exactly the reputation I want to have for myself. Besides, we can’t just run around looking into the secrets of everyone in town.” I could see Natalie’s disappointment. “If it has something to do with the rest of it . . .” I started.

“We won’t know unless we look, right?”

“I guess.”

I was worried about more than my reputation. We were pulling a thread from a sweater, unraveling an entire town’s secrets, for no good reason. It was the sort of thing that probably had driven poor John Archer to come to this area in the first place. Digging up the past, literally and figuratively, was turning out to be a complicated proposition.

“Can you watch the shop by yourself for a while?” I asked Natalie. “Eleanor will be in at noon. I just need to run a few errands.”

“Sure. It’s not exactly busy this morning and I’m just working on my quilt for the show.” She headed toward the back of the shop and the longarm machine.

I put Jeremy into his playpen and stared for a moment at the young boy as he picked up and dropped a stuffed toy. He picked up the toy a third time and handed it to me, laughing, and then lay down and wrapped himself in the blue and white log cabin quilt that lined the bottom of his playpen.

“It’s hard to believe that we all start off as innocent as Jeremy, and somewhere along the way, some people become killers—and others their victims,” I said, more to myself than anyone. Then I called back to Natalie, “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” I left with the hope I’d have some answers to something before I returned.

As I walked out to my car I saw Carrie across the street, waving to me.

“Everything okay?” I called over to her.

She ran across the street and met me at my car. “The shop got broken into this morning.”